Cloud Patches: Azure Status Upgrade, Amazon Elastic Expansions

Last week in cloud computing: Microsoft’s Azure status tracker sees a revamp, while Amazon tweaks its elastic options.

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• Azure Status, the dashboard which tracks the performance of each Azure service, has been revamped with a new look. You can customise the service to show performance in specific regions. While the announcement post shows the two planned Azure centres in Australia, those still haven’t officially launched yet.
• Azure Site Recovery, the revamped version of Hyper-V Recovery manager, is now officially in preview. This was announced at TechEd 2014 in the US and promised by the end of June, so the deadline has been met.
• If you’re a fan of testing products in a super-pre-beta stage, version 0.3.0 of the Azure WebJobs SDK is now in preview.
• Amazon Elastic Map Reduce now supports federated users, allowing the service to be managed without requiring a separate AWS IAM account. More details here.
• Elsewhere in products with “elastic” in the name, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, the service which transcodes videos in the cloud, now has the ability to include captions.
• And a final elastic update: Elastic Block Store (EBS) is now using SSD-based storage as its default option. More details here.

Cloud Patches rounds up new features and services added to major cloud computing platforms each week..